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Good luck and have a blast with it.
So being that I have a startup/tech background, we started to build our own solution. I made the decision early on to put in the extra effort to built it multi-tenant as a SaaS app so others could use it too.
So yes, it's built directly to scratch our own itch - and it's an itch I know others have as well from chatting with other business owners over the last few years. There was nothing out there for it, so we built it :)
Who made your explainer video? They did a great job.
What's your sales and marketing plan? Direct sales?
1.) Seed to about 10-15 businesses I know personally - these guys have been using it for about a month in private beta and giving feedback.
2.) I'm a frequent guest on several ecommerce podcasts and blogs - going to use the opportunity to speak about the difficulties of wholesale for small brands, with a small link to OrderCircle at the end.
3.) Building integrations to Shopify and Bigcommerce, which should help us get listed in their app stores and drive traffic.
Open to any other suggestions!
OrderCircle looks awesome, congrats!
Cheers, John
I have looked a lot at this space and there is a surprising lack of software to handle this that doesn't start to bleed into complex ERP or that isn't a poorly integrated "wholesale" feature for a traditional e-commerce app.
We use a SaaS called NowCommerce to handle this. It is designed with a bridge to our Quickbooks company file and it works really well though with limited functionality.
One key takeaway I've had looking at how orders are placed/processed/fulfilled in my business is that wholesale purchasing practices are VERY ingrained. Typically there is one person responsible for accounts payables and material purchasing in a small business. That person will most often place orders via Purchase Order (if the business is setup on credit terms). In my experience that AP person will simply enter their PO directly into Quickbooks and email it directly to the supplier- whose email contact is already setup in QB. For them to use your portal they would need to separately login to your application and duplicate their PO there by entering the info again.
The Purchase Order is critical for handling the payment of your invoice and for receiving items into inventory when they come in- so not having a PO in Quickbooks is not an option.
A small but growing segment of my customers use our wholesale order portal but you may find that when your customers have the capability right in front of them in QB it might be a trickier adoption curve than you think.
BTW if I had a magic wand I would create an email parsing application that can READ that emailed PDF purchase order and auto-populate an order form or Quickbooks invoice on the portal.
Best of luck from a fellow bootstrapper- please get in touch if I can be of any help!
Very familiar with NowCommerce - they're really the only one out there doing it even close to correctly (though they're very limited and locked into QB). Also fairly expensive, yes?
Great thought on a QB PO importer/reader. It's a bit tough since POs are free-form and you'd need to somehow automatically map it to the seller's SKUs. But we'll definitely put that on the list to think through further.
There are hundreds of solo entrepreneurs who own ecommerce properties. Some dropship, some carry inventory.... but all order from wholesale at some point. This is definitely a good market to get into.
In your site you have "Bill sells to Joe" as an example. My advice is that you market to both Bill and Joe, regardless of who pays you. It sounds like both Bill and Joe benefit, so you really only need one of them to convince the other.
To target the buy-side of wholesale ordering, I would recommend posting to marketing forums (Wickedfire comes to mind, maybe also forums around 4hourworkweek, millionaire fast lane type "lifestyle" businesses). You'll find very specific clientele there who will definitely use your software.
Our primary marketing is currently focused on the business owner, since they're the one that pays us for the subscription. However, we are launching a feature that lets buyers refer other businesses in exchange for Amazon gift cards ("Like buying this way? Tell your other suppliers!")
Good thought on going after the 4HWW community - this is perfect for a sub-10 employee business that doesn't have a lot of manpower to waste on pushing paper.
The first - and biggest - issue that came to mind is integration with warehousing, inventory management, ERP, etc. You have an API which is awesome, but you may want to look into building connectors to some more popular systems - it'll make setting it up much easier/cheaper and help sell it.
Another related question is the realtime inventory tracking - how will you handle this in companies who sell both retail and wholesale? Like above, integrations with POS and/or ecommerce systems will be helpful/necessary.
For both cases, one system has to be canonical - it may be OrderCircle, but it may not.
(Feel free to contact me if you want to chat - I've worked with your potential customers for many years.)
But you're totally right - we've got integrations with Bigcommerce and Shopify on the roadmap so users can pull in their products and make getting started easier.
For inventory, API is the best bet for now. When we launch our cart integrations, we'll probably treat the carts as "the truth" and decrement their inventory levels for wholesale transactions. Our early users are telling us they use their carts primarily to manage inventory.
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